Roundtable on Larry Bartels’ Unequal Democracy

This week we will be hosting a roundtable on Larry Bartels’s bookUnequal Democracy. This book, first published in 2008, has occasioned a great deal of debate about the sources and consequences of inequality in the United States. Here is Bartels talking about its origins. See also his earlier posts at Talking Points Memo. Here is his homepage.

Ours is not the first such roundtable—see here or here (gated). But this roundtable will offer not only several unique perspectives but also the opportunity to draw on research on inequality that has been conducted since the book’s debut.

Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker are Professors of Political Science at, respectively, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale. They are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics (here and see also Henry’s review), which also investigates the politics behind growing inequality in the United States.

Will Wilkinson is a writer and blogger whose work appears or has appeared in multiple places, including The Week, the Atlantic Monthly, and The Economist (he is W.W. here), among others. With Brink Lindsey, he is working on a book tentatively titled The Free-Market Progressive.Here are his thoughts on Unequal Democracy, as of p.3 of the book.

We are grateful to all of them. Today and tomorrow, The Monkey Cage will feature their reviews of the book. Bartels’s response to each review will follow. We invite readers to comment at any point.